Out There in the Darkness (5 page)

I shook my head.
 
“You're overlooking the obvious.”

“Like what?”

“Like he runs off last night, gets his car and then parks in the alley to see what's going to happen.”

“Right,” Neil said.
 
“Then he sees us bringing his friend out wrapped in a blanket.
 
He follows us to the dam and watches us throw his friend in.”

“And,” I said, “everybody had his car here last night.
 
Very easy for him to write down all the license numbers.”

“So he kills Bob,” Neil said.
 
“And starts making the phone calls to shake us up.”

“Why Bob?”

“Maybe he hates black people,” I said.

Mike looked first at me and then at Neil.
 
“You know what this is?”

“Here he goes,” Neil said.

“No; no, I'm serious here.
 
This is Catholic guilt.”

“How can it be Catholic guilt when I'm Jewish?” Neil said.

“In a culture like ours, everybody is a little bit Jewish and a little bit Catholic, anyway,” Mike said.
 
“So you guys are in the throes of Catholic guilt.
 
You feel bad about what we had to do last night—and we did have to do it, we really didn't have any choice—and the guilt starts to play on your mind.
 
So poor Bob electrocutes himself accidentally and you immediately think it's the second burglar.”

“He followed him,” Neil said.

“What?” Mike said.

“That's what he did, I bet.
 
The burglar.
 
Followed Bob around all day trying to figure out what was the best way to kill him.
 
You know, the best way that would look like an accident.
 
So then he finds out about the workshop and decides it's perfect.”

“That presumes,” Mike said, “that one of us is going to be next.”

“Hell, yes,” Neil said.
 
“That's why he's calling us.
 
Shake us up.
 
Sweat us out.
 
Let us know that he's out there somewhere, just waiting.
 
And that we're next.”

“I'm going to follow you to work tomorrow, Neil,” I said.
 
“And Mike's going to be with me.”

“You guys are having breakdowns.
 
You really are,” Mike said.

“We'll follow Neil tomorrow,” I said.
 
“And then on Saturday you and Neil can follow me.
 
If he's following
us
around, then we'll see it.
 
And then we can start following him.
 
We'll at least find out who he is.”

“And then what?” Mike said.
 
“Suppose we do find out where he lives?
 
Then what the hell do we do?”

Neil said, “I guess we worry about that when we get there, don't we?”

I
n the morning, I picked Mike up early.
 
We stopped off for doughnuts and coffee.
 
He's like my brother, not a morning person.
 
Crabby.
 
Our conversation was at a minimum, though he did say, “I could've used the extra hour's sleep this morning.
 
Instead of this crap, I mean.”

As agreed, we parked half a block from Neil's house.
 
Also as agreed, Neil emerged exactly at 7:35.
 
Kids were already in the wide suburban streets on skateboards and rollerblades.
 
No other car could be seen, except for a lone silver BMW in a driveway far down the block.

We followed him all the way to work.
 
Nobody followed him.
 
Nobody.

When I dropped Mike off at his office, he said, “You owe me an hour's sleep.”

“Two hours,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Tomorrow, you and Neil follow me around.”

“No way,” he said.

There are times when only blunt anger will work with Mike.
 
“It was your idea not to call the police, remember?
 
I'm not up for any of your sulking, Mike.
 
I'm really not.”

He sighed: “I guess you're right.”

I drove for two and a half hours Saturday morning.
 
I hit a hardware store, a lumberyard, and a Kmart.
 
At noon, I pulled into a McDonald's.
 
The three of us had some lunch.

“You didn't see anybody even suspicious?”

“Not even suspicious, Aaron,” Neil said.
 
“I'm sorry.”

“This is all bullshit.
 
He's not going to follow us around.”

“I want to give it one more chance,” I said.

Mike made a face.
 
“I'm not going to get up early, if that's what you've got in mind.”

I got angry again.
 
“Bob's dead, or have you forgotten?”

“Yeah, Aaron,” Mike said.
 
“Bob
is
dead.
 
He got electrocuted.
 
Accidentally.”

I said, “You really think it was an accident?”

“Of course I do,” Mike said.
 
“When do you want to try it again?”

“Tonight.
 
I'll do a little bowling.”

“There's a fight on I want to watch,” Mike said.

“Tape it,” I said.

“‘Tape it,'” he mocked.
 
“Since when did you start giving us orders?”

“Oh, for God's sake, Mike, grow up,” Neil said.
 
“There's no way that Bob's electrocution was an accident or a coincidence.
 
He's probably not going to stop with Bob, either.”

The bowling alley was mostly teenagers on Saturday night.
 
There was a time when bowling was mostly a working-class sport.
 
Now it's come to the suburbs and the white-collar people.
 
Now the bowling lane is a good place for teenage boys to meet teenage girls.

I bowled two games, drank three beers, and walked back outside an hour later.

Summer night.
 
Smell of dying heat, car exhaust, cigarette smoke, perfume.
 
Sound of jukebox, distant loud mufflers, even more distant rushing train, lonely baying dogs.

Mike and Neil were gone.

I went home and opened myself a beer.

The phone rang.
 
Once again, I was expecting Jan.

“Found the bastard,” Neil said.
 
“He followed you from your house to the bowling alley.
 
Then he got tired of waiting and took off again.
 
This time we followed
him
.”

“Where?”

He gave me an address.
 
It wasn't a good one.

“We're waiting for you to get here.
 
Then we're going up to pay him a little visit.”

“I need twenty minutes.”

“Hurry.”

Not even the silver touch of moonlight lent these blocks of crumbling stucco apartment houses any majesty or beauty.
 
The rats didn't even bother to hide.
 
They squatted red-eyed on the unmown lawns, amidst beer cans, and broken bottles, and wrappers from Taco John's, and used condoms that looked like deflated mushrooms.

Mike stood behind a tree.

“I followed him around back,” Mike said.
 
“He went up the fire escape on the back.
 
Then he jumped on this veranda.
 
He's in the back apartment on the right side.
 
Neil's in the backyard, watching for him.”

Mike looked down at my ball bat.
 
“That's a nice complement,” he said.
 
Then he showed me his handgun.
 
“To this.”

“Why the hell did you bring that?”

“Are you kidding?
 
You're the one who said he killed Bob.”

That, I couldn't argue with.

“All right, “I said, “but what happens when we catch him?”

“We tell him to lay off us,” Mike said.

“We need to go to the cops.”

“Oh, sure.
 
Sure we do.”
 
He shook his head.
 
He looked as if he were dealing with a child.
 
A very slow one.
 
“Aaron, going to the cops now won't bring Bob back.
 
And it's only going to get us in trouble.”

That's when we heard the shout.
 
It sounded like Neil.

Maybe five feet of rust-colored grass separated the yard from the alley that ran along the west side of the apartment house.

We ran down the alley, having to hop over an ancient drooping picket fence to reach the backyard where Neil lay sprawled, face down, next to a twenty-year-old Chevrolet that was tireless and up on blocks.
 
Through the windshield, you could see the huge gouges in the seats where the rats had eaten their fill.

The backyard smelled of dog shit and car oil.

Neil was moaning.
 
At least we knew he was alive.

“The sonofabitch,” he said, when we got him to his feet.
 
“I moved over to the other side, back of the car there, so he wouldn't see me if he tried to come down that fire escape.
 
I didn't figure there was another fire escape on the side of the building.
 
He must've come around there and snuck up on me.
 
He tried to kill me but I had this—”

In the moonlight, his wrist and the switchblade knife he held in his fingers were wet and dark with blood.
 
“I got him a couple of times in the arm.
 
Otherwise, I'd be dead.”

“We're going up there,” Mike said.

“How about checking Neil first?” I said.

“I'm fine,” Neil said.
 
“A little headache from where he caught me on the back of the neck.”
  
He waved his bloody blade.
 
“Good thing I had this.”

The landlord was on the first floor.
 
He wore Bermuda shorts and no shirt.
 
He looked eleven or twelve months pregnant with little male titties and enough coarse black hair to knit a sweater with.
 
He had a plastic-tipped cigarillo in the left corner of his mouth.

“Yeah?”

“Two-F,” I said.

“What about it?”

“Who lives there?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“If you were the law, you'd show me a badge.”

“I'll show you a badge,” Mike said, making a fist.

“Hey,” I said, playing good cop to his bad cop.
 
“You just let me speak to this gentleman.”

The guy seemed to like my reference to him as a gentleman.
 
It was probably the only flattering name he'd never been called.

“Sir, we saw somebody go up there.”

“Oh,” he said, “the vampires.”

“Vampires?”
He sucked down some cigarillo smoke.
 
“That's what we call ‘em, the missus and me.
 
They're street people, winos and homeless and all like that.
 
They know that sometimes some of these apartments ain't rented for a while, so they sneak up there and spend the night.”

“You don't stop them?”

“You think I'd get my head split open for something like that?”

“I guess that makes sense.”
 
Then: “So nobody's renting it now?”

“Nope, it ain't been rented for three months.
 
This fat broad lived there then.
 
Man, did she smell.
 
You know how fat people can smell sometimes?
 
She
sure smelled.”
 
He wasn't svelte.

Back on the front lawn, trying to wend my way between the mounds of dog shit, I said, “‘Vampires.'
 
Good name for them.”

“Yeah it is,” Neil said.
 
“I just keep thinking of the one who died.
 
His weird eyes.”

“Here we go again,” Mike said.
 
“You two guys love to scare the shit out of each other, don't you?
 
They're a couple of nickel-dime crooks, and that's
all
they are.”